Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-01-18-Speech-3-067"
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"en.20060118.2.3-067"2
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Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, let me start by joining in a great big ‘thank you’ to Ursula Stenzel for the ten years’ work she has done for Austria and for Austria’s citizens here in the European Parliament – with people in every political grouping and every institution. Perhaps I might add that she will, in a sense, be in charge of me, as she will be a sort of Mayor of central Vienna, which makes me now one of her charges and subjects. I wish her all the best for the future.
Turning to the labour market, an agreement has been reached with the ten or twelve new Member States. Ten are already on board, and Bulgaria and Romania are yet to be added. I am actually very confident that the new governments will be very cooperative about this in order to be able to keep to the 2007 target date, but these agreements include transitional rules that apply not only to the new countries but also to the existing Member States. I want to say, very frankly, that this has been done by mutual agreement. It is also my duty, as head of the Austrian Government, to take care that neither side of Austrian industry is put under excessive strain and that the balance between openness and protection – to which a number of speakers here have referred – is maintained in this case. I would also add that, in border regions, we are endeavouring to help by way of flexible arrangements for specific sectors – the care sector, for example – and so far, in fact, they have worked very well.
All I want to do where the European Court of Justice is concerned is to start off a debate in this House, without going into details. Here, too, there needs to be a certain balance between compliance with Community law and its implementation on the one hand and the subsidiarity clauses contained in the Treaties on the other, for there are such things as national rights, and national legislators, national law courts and the European Court of Justice need, in interpreting laws, to take account of them, and also to assess proportionality, as the German, Austrian and French Supreme Courts routinely do. All these things need to be kept in a reasonable balance, and I do not doubt that the European Court of Justice is aware of its responsibilities in this respect.
In closing, I would like to come back to the point that Mr Schulz made about Mozart and Freud and the magic flute, and to what others said about Zeus. I am far more modest and believe that six months’ worth of Presidency can never, realistically speaking, be enough to change Europe. That much is clear. We can, however, get things started. For example, we want to get the financial perspective off the ground, and we want to do it together with you. For that to happen, we need your agreement, and we will seek it. We have to give thought to what are the ideal means to this end. It was Austria that had originally proposed that the European Investment Bank should get some EUR 10 billion extra as a research facility – that is an important forward step made possible by a public/private partnership. There are different ideas of what flexibility means – with amounts between approximately EUR 1 billion and some EUR 3.5 – 4 billion between them – and they leave a certain amount of room for manoeuvre. These issues need to be addressed in a dialogue founded upon trust. First, of course, I need a mandate, and Austria will be getting one from the other Member States in a matter of a few weeks; we will be able to start talking with you as soon as the Commission has come up with its own practical proposals for sharing this out among the various headings. I am sure that we will be able to make more funds available to you in the areas you are interested in – namely research and competitiveness – than was made available during the previous period.
There is something else that should not be overlooked: the financial perspective provides for Bulgaria’s and Romania’s costs to be fully covered by the common agricultural policy, so that adds up to EUR 8 billion included in the current financial perspective. In real terms, resources are being cut by 4%, and EUR 8 billion are additionally being set aside for Romania and Bulgaria. If we look at these things in a realistic and practical light, then I believe that we will certainly, by way of dialogue founded upon trust, be able to sort something out.
I have no magic flute to hand, any more than I have a conductor’s baton or a magician’s wand, but, if I may refer back to Osmin, it is interesting to note that he actually ends up losing, and what is also interesting is what Constanze, who for our purposes is Europe, says to him at the end: ‘Nothing is as hateful as revenge, but only to great souls is it given to be humane and kindly and to forgive without self-seeking.’ Let us, then, be great souls and do something for Europe.
Perhaps I might, very briefly, address certain topics that have been raised in this debate. I am grateful to all those who have raised the issue of enlargement, with particular reference to the prospects for the Balkans. I shall be brief about this, for I have already been in touch with almost all the groups about it, and I know that you know that this is a high-priority issue for Austria, for the very simple reason that the Balkans are right next door to us – according to an old joke, the Balkans begin at the Rennweg in district III in central Vienna – and we are directly affected by what goes on there. If we in Europe do not export stability, we will end up importing instability. There must be no unstable zone in between Hungary, Austria, Slovenia, Italy and Greece. There must not be a grey area there, but rather a place with prospects, without which the necessary impetus for reform and the reconciliation of the various ethnic groups in Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo will not, at the end of the day, be possible. That is something that everyone must be aware of.
It is with that in mind that we are committing ourselves, and we have now also given the UN envoy Martti Ahtisaari a base and an office in Vienna, where in-depth discussions are a daily occurrence. We know that this is a task for us all to perform. I might well add that the Balkans is one of Europe’s great success stories. It may well have been the Americans who defeated Milosevic by military means, but 90% of the troops keeping the peace there today are Europeans. What we present to the world there now is not the military face of the European Union, but the pacific countenance of Europe. That is something of which everyone must be made aware.
It is worth mentioning that we are celebrating not only the 250th anniversary of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s birth and 150th of Sigmund Freud’s, but also the centenary of the first award of the Nobel Prize for Peace to a woman, Bertha von Suttner. Her slogan
lay down your weapons – is a real programme, and particularly relevant to the 21st century when one thinks of Iran, about which I had a conversation yesterday with Mohammed El Baradei – the IAEA, too, is based in Vienna. Iran is an issue of the utmost concern. Mr El Baradei said, in a readable interview in the latest issue of
that, even after his inspectors had spent three years in intensive talks, closely examining and monitoring Iran’s nuclear programme, it was still not possible to confirm that it was peaceable in character, and that is an issue to which we will be devoting a great deal of attention over the coming months. It is not for us to make threatening gestures about it; on the contrary, we have to send a clear message from Europe that bids Iran go back to the moratorium, back to the negotiating table, with no unilateral actions that could end up putting the peace of the wider world in jeopardy, and that message must be carried by your House, by the Council, by the Commission, and by our representatives Benita Ferrero-Waldner and Javier Solana. That is the only way in which we will gain credibility in that part of the world.
Let me turn to the subject of energy, which is something else that I do not want to mince my words about. I do know, of course, that every country has its own way of dealing with this issue, but I have campaigned for every country, at the end of the day, to have freedom of choice when it comes to its means of generating energy, and even then there are a number of issues that are certainly open to debate. I personally believe that it would be very, very dangerous to go down the road that leads to a revival of nuclear power, and there are many issues around it that have not yet been resolved. It is a field in which public concern must not be underestimated. At European level, though, we can address the issue of renewable energy, about which Mr Barroso has come up with some truly first-class ideas, and biofuels, in which, might I add, the Americans are investing five times as much as Europe and its Member States combined. This is an area in which we need credibility. We have renewable resources, we have wood, we have biomass. As I see it, that presents agriculture with an opportunity over the coming years and decades. Without, of course, disregarding the need to take account of the differences that do of course exist between the Member States, this is an issue that we should address very honestly and very frankly.
The next issue I would like to look at is that of the trans-European networks. I have been a member of the European Council for ten years; once, when I was foreign minister, I was even in charge of an Austrian Council Presidency. For ten years, we have been talking about trans-European networks, and, so far, not one single project has been brought to a conclusion. Let me make that clear to you; we must succeed in this. It really is an ambition of mine – and I hope that the Commission will help us in this – to get at least the first sod dug on the Brenner railway tunnel project during our Presidency. If we want to get traffic off the roads, we have to have a competitive rail infrastructure to get it on to; to that there is no alternative. What I ask is that we should play our part in eventually making a success of these Trans-European networks; everything else is rhetoric.
One thing that I forgot to mention when discussing international issues is the CIA question, and that we are taking very seriously. If I may be perfectly frank about this, there must be no difference in standards here; human rights are indivisible, and so is the rule of law. At the time the American public started to debate this, I happened to be with the Bertelsmann Foundation in Washington, where we met with the Republican Deputy Majority Leader in the Senate, Senator Bennett, and we addressed the issue in precisely those terms. We therefore give our entire support to the Council of Europe in its investigations, and I would also ask the Member States to conduct their own where necessary. There can be no double standards here: hidden jails, secret flights, the handing over of undesirable persons, are things that must of course, where they as suspected, be pursued with the full rigour of the law, but it must be done in accordance with our own legal standards. I have no doubt that your House and our Council will take the same approach to this and go forward together.
I am much obliged to you for the observation that we have to give much more consideration to children’s rights. We note with great concern that appalling things are going on in this area, with child pornography being transmitted around the globe via the Internet, with people trafficking involving the sale of children around the world, with far too little understanding even in European, developed societies of the need to protect children’s rights, support families, and balance work and family life – all these matters are clearly, of course, for nation states to deal with, but they can be raised at Community level.
Some of you have raised the subject of the rights of minorities in Austria, and it is one that I am happy to deal with. During my term of office – since the year 2000, that is – town signs in the Croatian and Hungarian languages have been set up in Burgenland; this has been the occasion for great popular celebrations, has involved a great deal of public participation, and there has been a consensus in its favour. Last year indeed, only a matter of a few months ago, as part of the celebrations of our State Treaty’s anniversary, 20 towns and villages acquired additional bilingual signs, and this was a great success. In some boroughs, things have not progressed far enough. Last Friday, I met with 12 mayors in their boroughs in the quest for a shared solution. Although I am making this commitment to your House, it is not your House that should be concerning itself with this issue; on the contrary, it is primarily a matter for us back in Austria. I will not accept the accusation that we, in Austria, take less account of minority rights than do other regions of Europe, but I do want consensus among the political forces, and I want to seek it with the people. I am also confident that we will succeed in finding it."@en1
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"‘Die Waffen nieder’"1
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